NASCAR looks ahead to 2013

Brad Keselowski waves to the crowd during the 86th American Thanksgiving Parade on Thursday in his hometown of Detroit. (Steve Perez | Detroit News | Associated Press)

By JENNA FRYERAssociated Press

Published: Thursday, November 22, 2012 at 10:54 p.m.

Last Modified: Thursday, November 22, 2012 at 11:52 p.m.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The season hadn’t even ended before NASCAR’s top executives were previewing 2013, the new “Gen 6” cars and elements of a five-year industry “action plan” designed to engage and excite fans.

The season ended with a celebratory final image of fresh-faced champion Brad Keselowski, drunk on the combination of his sponsor’s beer and the joy of giving team owner Roger Penske his first championship. And the days since Sunday’s finalé have been a coming out party for the 28-year-old from suburban Detroit, who is all over the television dial smoothly shilling for NASCAR.

It’s a reprieve from the bad news: ESPN’s ratings from the race at Homestead-Miami Speedway were down 25 percent from last year’s race, the most-viewed in network history. Ratings were down or flat for all 10 Chase for the Sprint Cup championship races this season.

Why? Because the racing in 2012 was mostly forgettable, something chairman Brian France has tasked his entire competition department with fixing.

“The missing and final piece, which we’re working on now, is to improve on the quality of racing,” France said before Sunday’s finalé. “Everyone knows a stated goal of ours is to have the closest, most competitive, tightest racing that we can. And that’s what we’re testing now.”

So in one sense, NASCAR couldn’t wait to get out of Homestead and officially close a 2012 season that opened with perhaps the most bizarre Daytona 500 in history.

Heavy rains washed out NASCAR’s marquee event for the first time in 54 runnings, pushing the race into a prime-time Monday night slot. Then, a freak crash between Juan Pablo Montoya and a truck loaded with jet fuel ignited a fuel fire and a nearly two-hour delay. While track workers tried to clean the mess with Tide laundry detergent, Keselowski grabbed worldwide attention with both thumbs by tweeting updates from his car.

The TV ratings were good, the buzz surrounding NASCAR was better but it wasn’t sustainable as the Sprint Cup Series quickly fell into a stretch of nearly unwatchable racing. California ran caution-free until rain brought out the yellow that eventually stopped the race. Texas had two debris cautions until the race went green 234 laps to the finish.

Bristol featured a 219-lap green-flag run. Kansas in the spring had three cautions, two for debris and one for a single-car spin and the race ended with a 75-lap green-flag run.

With Richmond and Talladega looming, fans believed action-packed racing was ahead. Instead, Richmond was a bland affair until Carl Edwards was accused of jumping a late restart and Talladega exposed the disconnect between drivers and fans. Sure, there was the usual late-race multi-car accident, and Tony Stewart’s tongue-in-cheek assessment of the racing proved there’s no middle ground in racin’ vs. wreckin’.

“It’s not fair to these fans for them to not see more wrecks than that and more torn-up cars,” he sarcastically said. “We still had over half the cars running at the end, and it shouldn’t be that way.”

When NASCAR returned to Daytona in July, promoter Bruton Smith was calling for mandatory cautions to spice up the racing and France was adamantly opposed to the need for gimmicks. But, France revealed that he’d dispatched senior vice president of racing operations Steve O’Donnell to North Carolina to repurpose NASCAR’s research and development center and zero in on the correct rules package for the debut of the new car next year.

Keselowski delivered as soon as the Chase opened, stealing a win from Johnson at Chicagoland and hanging with the five-time champion and Denny Hamlin round-for-round all the way to Homestead. The title fights were at Texas, where Keselowski had to line up for three late restarts, winning the first two but losing to Johnson on the last one to go down seven points headed into Phoenix.

It was one of Johnson’s best tracks and a place where Keselowski was unproven. But he was better than Johnson for two-thirds of the race, and then a blown tire sent Johnson into the wall.

It put Keselowski in great shape headed into the finalé, but not before Jeff Gordon intentionally wrecked Clint Bowyer to trigger a garage-area melee and prove the season-long theme that the sideshows tend to overshadow the actual racing.

Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.